Sears site review: the good, the bad and the ugly
I've been taking a look at the Sears website from a user experience perspective to see what the retailer does well online, and where it can improve.
I've highlighted some excellent features on the site that other online retailers could learn from, some relatively minor irritations that would annoy users, and problems that may make users abandon the site.
Overall, the site performs well and contains some excellent features, such as proactive use of live chat.
However, even with the best sites, there is always room for improvement...
Why HMV shouldn't make users register before checkout
Making customers register before they checkout is a barrier to purchase, yet many online retailers have yet to learn this lesson.
The arguments against this barrier are compelling. For example, ASOS halved its abandonment rate at the registration page simply by removing any mention of creating an account.
In a more famous example from Jared Spool, one retailer added $300m to its annual revenues by removing the registration button.
These are lessons that HMV needs to learn in order to optimise conversion rates and reduce abandonments.
Persuasive checkout best practice from ASOS
As a follow-up to my earlier article, Shopping basket best practice from ASOS, I’ve taken a look at the updated ASOS checkout experience. It includes one change which has reduced their checkout abandonment rate by 50%.
The ASOS website delivers an excellent browsing and shopping experience, and I regularly feature examples from the retailer in my e-commerce best practice training courses.
The updated checkout continues this trend, as the earlier version certainly didn’t fit in well with their highly tuned shopping experience up to checkout.
This article will recap on what ASOS is doing well on its shopping basket, look at how it is handling new customer checkout, and the variety of persuasive checkout lessons we can take from them as well as identifying a few areas of improvement.
House of Fraser: site review
House of Fraser unveiled an updated version of its website recently.
Online sales rose by 110% in the first 24 weeks of the year, and House of Fraser aims to continue this growth with the redesigned website.
The previous incarnation, as reviewed here by Paul Rouke in 2007, was a good site, but the new version provides a more up to date, streamlined look.
Why do consumers abandon online purchases?
From security concerns to annoyances around hidden charges or high delivery costs, there are a number of possible reasons why not make a purchase from an online retailer.
An Econsultancy survey of 2,000 UK consumers, conducted using the TolunaQuick tool, looks at the reasons why customers choose to abandon online purchases.
Of the 2,000 respondents, just 12.8% don't shop online, the other 87.2% shop at least several times per year.
Some highlights from the survey after the jump...
Checkout best practice revisited
It’s been over two years since I published an article on the Econsultancy blog entitled: Are retailers following best practice to improve conversion rates?
In that article I was specifically looking at the checkout processes of a variety of retailers, and in particular whether or not they have enclosed (or in other words removed site wide elements and distractions to focus the user) the process.
In this article I have revisited the retailers who featured in this article to see which of the retailers who didn’t enclose their checkouts then are now using this approach .
Enclosing the checkout is an approach I almost always recommend my retail clients adopt as a primary way of improving their checkout funnel conversion rate.
Ten best practices from the new Lakeland website
Homeware retailer Lakeland launched its redesigned website recently, and the result is a good looking and usable site.
I've picked out things that etailers could do better online in the past, but for a change, I've listed ten e-commerce best practices from the new site, as well as a couple of potential improvements...
Site review: Brandosa's UK launch
Brandosa, an online shoe retailer which operates in Europe as brandos.com, launched its UK e-commerce site this week.
Since launching in 2006, the retailer has sold 350,000 pairs of shoes to customers in Sweden, Norway, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, and the Netherlands.
I've been having a look at the new site...
Best Buy UK: site review
Having already opened a number of stores, US electronics retailer Best Buy launched its first transactional website in the UK last week.
I've been trying the new site out...
Q&A: Debenhams' Harriet Williams on mobile commerce
Debenhams recently launched a mobile commerce app for iPhone users, which forms one part of an increased focus on multichannel from the retailer.
I interviewed Debenhams strategy and online marketing controller Harriet Williams about the new app, plans for using QR codes, and Debenhams future mobile releases..
